Reviews

THE SUFFERING OF THE IMPASSIBLE GOD: THE DIALECTICS OFPATRISTIC THOUGHT by Paul L Gavrilyuk, Oxford University Press, Oxford,2004, Pp. xii+210, £45.00 hbk.

Gavrilyuk begins his work by stating the obvious contemporary theological fact:‘With a few significant exceptions, modern theologians advocate the claim that Godsuffers’ (p. 1). There is a variety of inter-related reasons for arguing for such aposition, but Gavrilyuk focuses on one of the central and universal claims of thiscontemporary phenomenon, that is, that the Fathers of the Church too closely alliedthemselves to the god/s of Greek philosophy and in so doing forsook the God of theBible, or what Gavrilyuk calls ‘The Theory of Theology’s Fall into HellenisticPhilosophy’ (p. 5). His contention, and so purpose of this book, is to demonstratethat such a theory is utterly naıve in its historical foundation, absolutely deceptive inits philosophical tenets, and entirely misguided in its understanding and interpretingof the Christian gospel. Gavrilyuk rightly perceives that the Incarnation is thehermeneutical key to the Fathers’ notion of God, and it is precisely theIncarnation that then became the basis of their rejection of all popular pagan notionsof God as well as the more sophisticated Greek philosophical notions of God (see p. 18).In his first chapter Gavrilyuk very astutely demonstrates that, contrary to the

simplistic and so deceptive contemporary perception, the multiplicity of Greekphilosophical schools did not themselves hold a common understanding of God’simpassibility or passibility. Gavrilyuk convincingly argues that the Fathers neversanctioned or owned any of these conflicting views of God, but rather were guidedby the living and active God of the Bible, particularly by the revelation that God didactually become man. Thus, Gavrilyuk concludes: ‘The Theory of Theology’s Fallinto Hellenistic Philosophy must be once and for all buried with honours, as one ofthe most enduring and illuminating mistakes among the interpretations of thedevelopment of Christian doctrine’ (p. 46). In subsequent chapters Gavrilyuk exam-ines the various Fathers and the controversies in which they were embroiled. Forexample: ‘By calling God ‘‘impassible’’ Justin and other Apologists were clearing thedecks of popular theological discourse in order to make space for the God-befittingemotionally coloured characteristics such as mercy, love and compassion’ (p. 51).Moreover, impassibility, among the Fathers, rather than being perceived as a nega-tive virtue that forces God to be aloof and disinterested, actually frees him of‘uncontrollable vengeance, that repentant sinners may approach him withoutdespair. Far from being a barrier to divine care and loving-kindness, divine impas-sibility is their very foundation’ (p. 62).Gavrilyuk astutely grasps that all the major Christian Trinitarian and

Christological heresies were actually those that gave too much credence to falsephilosophical notions. The Docetists denied the reality of the humanity of Christprecisely because such a passible humanity would jeopardize the divine transcendentimmutable perfection. Yet the orthodox defenders, such as Ignatius of Antioch andIrenaeus, while upholding God’s unchanging love, argued that faith demanded thatsuch a God did actually take-on authentic flesh with all of its passible expressions(see chapter 3). In his excellent chapter on Arianism, Gavrilyuk clearly demonstratesthat the Arian claim that the Son was a creature rested not only on the anthro-pomorphic idea that ‘generation’ implied a mutable and passible change within the

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Godhead, but equally, and more so, that if the Son did actually take-on flesh, thenhe could not be truly divine. ‘The passible Son was inferior in essence to theimpassible Father in that he was (a) generated, and (b) subject to suffering(p. 130). They may have wanted to ensure that the Son actually suffered and diedand so lived an authentic human life, but in so pursuing this course the Arians wereadamant that the Son must therefore not be truly God. It was merely the logic of theDocetists in reverse. Gavrilyuk rightly points out that it was the pro-Nicenes who feltthe problem more intensely because it was they who preserved the mystery – thetranscendent God who is immutably perfect and impassibly loving is the sameGod who entered time and history as a man, and as a man lived a changeable andpassible life.The culmination of this Christian understanding of God is found within the

Nestorian controversy. Nestorius was more ardently concerned with preservingGod’s impassibility than, contrary to much contemporary opinion, with maintainingChrist’s authentic humanity. This is why all passible attributes must be predicated ofthe man Jesus and not of the divine Son. Thus Gavrilyuk concludes that Nestoriantheology was very similar to Arian theology. ‘For both parties, despite theirprofound Christological differences, the divine impassibility precluded God’s directinvolvement in everything related to the created order, especially the experiences thatindicated human weakness’ (p. 144). Moreover, while he upheld the impassibleperfection of the Son’s divine nature, Cyril recognised that Nicaea demanded thatthe Son who was homoousion with the Father was the same Son who truly becameman and so was born, suffered, died and was buried. These are not the thoughts of aGreek philosopher, but a profession of biblical faith, one which knew that God wasindeed completely other than all he created, and yet could act in time and history inall his complete otherness – the Incarnation being the ultimate expression of thisdivine ability. Moreover, Cyril realised that it was the passible suffering of the Son asman that was redemptive and not, unlike the contemporary passibilists, some divinepassible suffering. ‘The presupposition that the divine nature could itself sufferrenders the assumption of humanity superfluous. If God could suffer as humansdo without assuming humanity, the incarnation would be unnecessary’ (p. 159).While there are some minor points that I would argue with, Gavrilyuk has written an

excellent book, one that is both scholarly and clear. He ‘has attempted to debunk theFall Theory once and for all’ (p. 179), and I believe that he has succeeded. The problemis that those who are ‘debunked’ rarely realise that such has been done to them. Yet it isindeed heartening to find a book that has done so much to redeem the intellectualintegrity and, more so, to enhance the authentic faith of the Fathers of the Church.

THOMAS G WEINANDY OFM CAP.

FEMINISM AND THEOLOGY edited by Janet Martin Soskice and DianaLipton, Oxford Readings in Theology, OUP, Oxford, 2003, Pp. 396, £20 pbk.

WOMEN IN CHRIST: TOWARD A NEW FEMINISM edited by Michele M.Schumacher, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2004, Pp. 358, $38 pbk.

Upon completing these two books, I have read six books on feminist theology, allbut one at the behest of book review editors. Both compilations name a 1960 articleby Judith Plaskow as the originator of the editorial prejudice that women experiencea special interest in ‘women’s experience.’ It’s a circular assumption which manyyoung women entering the profession of theology have met in their Heads ofDepartment, who require them to teach courses on a topic in which they hithertohad no knowledge or interest. ‘‘No man,’’ they say, ‘‘would be made to teach a courseon ‘men’s theology’’’; a longer perspective enables one to add, ‘‘no man would be

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told by his bishop, ‘we particularly want a man on our Commission.’’’ PhemePerkins’s chapter in the Soskice/Lipton compilation, on Philippians, voices theassumption by noting that Paul was ‘ambiguous’ about the involvement of womenin his communities: ‘‘the dominant images of athletic contest & military service donot reflect their experience. Neither does the exchange of authorized, male represen-tatives . . . much of the imagery in Philippians speaks only of male experience’’(p. 198). From this we can gather the insight, if such it be, that not only can nowoman make a leap of imagination into such experiences, but nor can the vastmajority of men who have never fought in a war or wrestled in the arena; Newmanwas deluding himself when he remarked that a biography of Wellington made him‘‘burn to have been a soldier’’, and the audiences of action movies, war films, and theOlympic games must all be sporty Territorial Army types.Most people trace such non-receptive experientialism back to Schleiermacher, but

Prudence Allen is closer to the mark in making William James the progenitor of thiskind of feminism (see Allen’s scholarly essay, ‘‘Can Feminism Be a Humanism,’’ inSchumacher’s The New Feminism). Because of James’s influence on educationaltheory, teachers are familiar both with the maxim that students must be taughtfrom what they know, and with the obstruction such pedagogy causes to openingstudents’ minds to anything they don’t know. People who teach theologicalaesthetics have figured out that it will only serve a niche market of arty studentsunless one can show that beauty has an impact across the spectrum of theology: onewishes it had been similarly evident to Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz that it’s no good tellingus that the ‘‘theology I have been involved in articulating is born out of myexperience and that of other Hispanic women’’ (Soskice/Lipton, p. 91) unless oneexplains why Mujerista theology has broader theological implications. The Churchhistorian Jane Dempsey Douglass presents evidence for Luther’s misogyny from hisGenesis Commentaries (‘‘And although Eve was . . . similar to Adam with respect tothe image of God, . . . still, she was a woman. For just as the sun is more extra-ordinary than the moon, so even though the woman is a most beautiful work ofGod, still she does not equal the glory and worthiness of the man’’, Lipton/Soskice,p. 78). We can all catch the negative moral implications of this. For a suggestion asto why it matters theologically, we have to turn to Michele Schumacher: ‘‘Whennature . . . is overpowered by grace – as in . . . Lutheran thought whereby it, in theabsence of grace, is capable of nothing but evil – the pendulum swingstoward . . . the denial of . . . divine influence upon human nature . . . Abandonedto human governance . . . nature . . . returns to its own ‘fallen’ state. Its ‘natural’orientation to the good . . . is called into question, especially when it is perceived byfeminists as controlled by a patriarchal society . . . Nature becomes that which‘man’ wishes it to be: a manipulative tool whereby he achieves his sovereign ruleover women and ‘lesser’ men. Such a dishonorable intention might . . . be attributedto Luther when he argues: ‘The fact that pregnancies wear women out and in the endlead to death is not serious. Let the pregnancies kill them; they are here for that.’’’(Schumacher, p. 30). Schumacher’s nature-grace theory indicates a connectionbetween Luther’s attitude to women and his theology as a whole, and thus refers itto points of concern wider than a moralising humanism which currently feels boundto nod to women’s experience, in passing.The contributors to Women In Christ: Toward A New Feminism do recognise that

no-one would have thought, for instance, of arguing that a Catholic understandingof grace and nature works out better for women in particular, if a very different kindof feminism had not first raised the issue of the particularity of women: that, as JanetSoskice puts it, the ‘‘pungency of Mary Daly’s writings was required to wakentheologians from generations of slumber’’ (Soskice/Lipton, p. 7). But, it is the NewFeminism which is now taking the discussion forward, as in Schumacher’s essay onthe place of receptive experience in theology, or in Francis Martin and Anne-MariePelletier’s great pieces on the Bride-Bridegroom relation between Christ and his

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Church as authentic liberation from the master-slave ethos. Their arguments requirea rephrasing of both the biological naturalist’s identification of sex and gender, andthe postmodern sex-gender distinction: as Beatriz Vollmer Coles has it (I think),gender transcendence means creatively making a spiritual and moral use of one’s givensex (‘‘New Feminism: A Sex Gender Reunion’’). There must be ‘men’ and ‘women’ as‘real universals’ for this defence of male-female complementarity to bear out.Since it was John Paul II who revived the term new feminism in his 1995 encyclical

Evangelium Vitae, the Schumacher team take their cue from this theological datumand from the realist phenomenology the Pope espoused as a young philosopher. SoEdith Stein’s reflections on the nature of ‘woman’ are heavily rehearsed in Women inChrist: Toward a New Feminism. Though the essays are delightfully intricate, I wasleft wondering whether phenomenological ‘essentialism’ translates into an Anglo-Saxon context. But then, going on to the second book, I read Janet Martin’sSoskice’s piece, in which, reminding us of the Patristic and mediaeval devotions toJesus as bleeding mother, she contends that it ‘‘is by no means clear that Christ isalways and everywhere in the symbolic order a ‘male’ figure. There is abundant sensein seeing Christ as our mother, and his blood as the source of new life’’ (Soskice/Lipton, p. 337). There’s a ‘British Museum religion’ feel to this apparent commonsense: it may be a personal predilection, but I do not want Jesus to be my mummy.Perhaps, analogously, fewer people want their father to be their metaphoricalmother than the older feminists hope; they want him to be up for it some of thetime; but the miraculously lactating Bernard of Clairvaux would be a better para-digm of mediaeval gender-bender if he hadn’t provoked a pogrom in the wake of theFirst Crusade, and caused Abelard such unnecessary misfortune. Merely on the basisof experiential centrality, the ‘New Feminists’ are today the more theologicallyengaging, with their analogy of ‘‘God and Israel who, through the grace of love,encounter each other face-to-face, as man and woman in their original state of awe(Gen. 2)’’ (Pelletier, in Schumacher, p. 236).

FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY

YVES CONGAR’S VISION OF THE CHURCH IN A WORLD OF UNBELIEF byGabriel Flynn, Ashgate, Aldershot/Burlington, 2004, Pp. 280, £49.95 hbk.

Cardinal Yves Congar OP is first and foremost associated with Catholic ecumenism.His passionate vision of the Church as the true unifier of humankind triumphedwhen the Church accepted ecumenism at Vatican II. Apart from his deep faith, loveof the Church and ‘active patience’, as he called it (Congar spent much of the 1950sunder censure), a major factor in his success was the breadth and solidity of hisscholarship. Congar’s more ‘suspect’ ideas, particularly his notion that doctrine wasnot coterminous with any one mode of expression, were shown to be founded solidlyon Scripture and Patristics. In other words, what was supposedly new was actuallytraditional, and much older than the supposedly ‘traditional’ formulae which wentback only to the Scholastics or Trent. This method of ressourcement, or going backto the sources, is employed by Gabriel Flynn in studying Congar himself, and resultsin a surprising discovery: Congar was not driven primarily by a passion for ecumen-ism, but by the recognition that even in the 1930s Europe was a society of unbelief.Indeed, secularisation, he argued, had begun in the 14th Century, with the rise of laypower, which developed into individualist spiritualities and rationalist humanism. Atthe same time division between Christians and religious war caused scandal, and theChurch’s defensive response to criticism and negative attitude to social changecontributed to the sundering of religion from the reality of people’s lives. Some ofthese factors are still relevant to our own time, which is the impetus for Flynn’sanalysis of Congar’s theology.

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Congar’s output was massive (some eighty books and over a hundred articles)and not systematic. This was due not just to his lack of philosophical inclination,but also the nature of his project. Concerned that ‘Baroque theology’ hadreduced Catholicism to narrow formulae and rigid systems which were simplyalien to many people, he sought to draw out all the riches of Scripture andTradition to help the Church appeal to the widest audience possible. So Congaruses many models and concepts for the Church: the Body of Christ, People ofGod, Sacrament of Universal Salvation, ‘the world believing in Christ’,Communion, Koinonia . . . He shifts continually from one concept to another,and all in an intellectual but passionate style redolent of the Fathers, whichmakes it difficult to treat his work systematically. This is perhaps why, althoughthe main body of Flynn’s work is divided into three chapters (Congar’s vision ofthe Church, the shape of the Church and the reform of the Church), he tendstowards repetition.For all that, Flynn’s study is a valuable treatment of some of the implied

tensions – between Tradition and traditions, unity and diversity, baptised andordained priesthood, and so on. Importantly, he reveals Congar as a theologianwho cannot be ‘claimed’ by either ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives’: Congar severelycriticised the ‘integralists’ who would fossilize every formula and practice andrefuse to recognise the Church’s failings; but he had no more time for realModernists, who he felt were intellectual theologians with no priestly or pastoralsense of the Church. Flynn highlights a few times Congar’s seeming replacementof the demand for full visible unity between Christians with (by 1980) an idea of‘reconciled diversities’. Regrettably he does not discuss this in more detail, norCongar’s apparent rejection of the urgency of evangelisation.The chapter on reform and tradition is of special value, much of it analysing

Congar’s untranslated Vraie et Fausse Reforme de l’Eglise (1950). Flynn gives a fineexposition of Congar’s considered response to protestant and liberal criticisms:precisely because the essential structures of the Church (sacraments and ordainedministries) are divinely given, their celebration must reveal rather than deform theirreality. The source for reform is Scripture and Tradition, in which liturgy plays acentral role as the cosmic sacrifice, the offering of the whole world to God.But given that Congar’s programme for reform was adopted pretty much in its

totality at Vatican II, why has the Church not been more successful in themodern world? Flynn returns to his original issue, and attempts to set someparameters for an enquiry into unbelief now. While recognising the effect of thecollapse in social structures, he considers that Congar’s demand for a reconnec-tion of religion and life needs to be heeded properly. He also implies thatCongar’s emphasis on the laity has (unintentionally) lessened the status ofordained ministry, and that the impetus for evangelisation has been lost just ata time when a message of hope is most needed. Flynn perceives too a retreat intoauthoritarian statements and the safety of the presbytery, although he does notexpand on this.It is hard to disagree though that the real causes of unbelief need to be addressed

honestly. But this does not require yet another round of breast-beating whichreduces apologetics to saying sorry. Rather, just as Congar looked at the traditionof the Church of his time in its historical context, we need to do the same now. Freedas we now are from the absolutism of any theological system, we can search in thegreat riches of the Church’s tradition for new ways of preaching the Gospel – be thatfrom the Fathers, the Counter-Reform, Vatican II or the modern Charismatics.Congar offers us sound principles, and Flynn’s balanced presentation will get usoff to a good start.

DOMINIC WHITE OP

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THEOPOLITICAL IMAGINATION: DISCOVERING THE LITURGY AS APOLITICAL ACT IN AN AGE OF GLOBAL CONSUMERISM byWilliam T. Cavanaugh, T&T Clark, London, 2002, Pp. 122, £14.99 pbk.

Behind the question of whether to define one’s theology as ‘public’ or ‘political’ lies amore fundamental one: what is our understanding of ‘being public’ and ‘beingpolitical’ at all such that theology can be thought simply to insert itself into therelevant debate? William Cavanaugh gets to the heart of this matter by suggestingthat whatever we want to call it, a theology that engages with society should be acritique of the very way we have come to separate religious and political life in thefirst place. Theology, his book argues, cannot be something that simply shouts at thesidelines – it must be an alternative vision of politics and public life, a practice of theimagination inseparable from them. At the heart of Theopolitical Imagination istherefore this nod towards Augustine (and, some will argue, the ideas of RadicalOrthodoxy) and his rejection of the state, the imperium’s authority to define andmonopolise ‘publicness’ in the first place. Since the imperium has forfeited this role‘‘by its refusal to do justice, by refusing to give God his due’’ (p. 84), the City of Godis an alternative imagination of political space that should resist the hold it has overpeople and communities. This is the premise from which Cavanaugh sees in theologya resource for resisting the effects of global consumerism.In most mainstream bookshops today a large section of the ‘political theory’

section will be devoted to various critiques of globalisation, the ‘anti-globalisation’movement, and various eclectic compilations on anticapitalism. It is refreshing to seethat Cavanaugh doesn’t simply repeat these well-rehearsed ideas with a Christian‘angle’. This book suggests that that kind of approach would only reinforce the viewof religious critique as a domesticated pastime, tamed out of harm’s way and unable,therefore, to say something original and challenging about the evils of globalcapitalism. Such a view presupposes the central premise of the book, which is arejection of the ‘myth’ of the secular state as ‘salvation’ from religious intoleranceand violence. If his damning criticism of this historic ‘myth’, propagated in historybooks about the European wars of religion, looks at first like a nostalgia for religiousauthoritarianism, his approach in the end simply adds an interesting theologicaldimension to what is now becoming a popular critique of ‘Empire’ and the rise ofimperial sovereignty generally. The modern state, goes the argument, has simplymade violence its own ‘religio’, its ‘‘habitual discipline for binding us one to another’’(p. 46). Cavanaugh’s additional argument is that theology has a right to reclaim itsusurped concepts. Modern statecraft has not only continued the bloodshed ofsectarian bigotry and social repression, it has also used and distorted a theology ofpublic and political life. ‘‘The modern state’’, he writes, ‘‘is but a false copy of theBody of Christ’’ (p. 46), replacing notions of universal kinship with atomised,Lockean individualism and fear-based Hobbesian social ‘peace’. Cavanaugh’s argu-ment should have serious consequences for any contextual approach to theologysimply because it rejects the assumption that theology, having been ‘disarmed’ fromdictating public policy, is now ‘free’ to critique and influence it. We should, in otherwords, have learned our lessons from Foucault by now about the extent of the‘‘interpenetration of state and society’’ (p. 70). It is an indictment, therefore, of theinvention of ‘civil society’ in more recent times, with emphasis on the voluntarysector, education programs, campaign groups and the interpretation of notions ofcitizenship. For a public theology to simply fill in the gaps of free society is thereforeto disarm its symbols. In civil society ‘‘Christian symbols must be run through thesausage-grinder of social ethics before coming out on the other end as publiclydigestible policy.’’(81)Does Cavanaugh succeed in giving us a glimpse of theological practices that,

unlike the ‘myth of civil society as free space’ genuinely ‘‘resist the thrall of thestate’’ (p. 46)? There is a real danger that in focusing on liturgical practices (with

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their own tendencies towards sectarianism and prejudice, a point which Cavanaughonly briefly mentions) as the loci of such resistance, the power relations betweenChurch and state are simply contested once again, not radically re-imagined. Anostalgia for the eucharistic practices of the early Church will not stop the tempta-tion, as Cavanaugh himself puts it, to see it today as the ‘‘retreat into a place-boundtheocracy or sect’’ (p. 116) . In its defence, Cavanaugh’s book doesn’t try to besomething it isn’t – its resources for resistance to global capitalism are drawn fromCatholic social teaching, and describe as its most potent model the potential of thecelebration of Mass, particularly in Latin America, to reclaim otherwise capitalised,surveilled, fragmented space in globalised culture. Eucharistic practice, he shows,can become a counter-cultural symbol of authentic global community, a kind ofsacralised appraisal of the imperative to think global (the ‘‘world in a wafer’’(p. 112)), act local (catholicity as the centrality of each local church) against the‘‘detached hypermobility’’ (p. 118) of global capitalism. But we should expect moreof the book than to be a radical resource for Catholics, since it claims, moregenerally, to apply the model of authentic Christian discipleship as a form of‘‘anarchy’’ in its rejection of the ‘‘false order of the state’’ (p. 47) – an attempt, inother words, to say something generally about human community and discipleshipby which anti-capitalist resistance might draw strength. Perhaps I am asking toomuch of such a short book, but it does seem to stretch the imagination (which,perhaps, is Cavanaugh’s intention anyway) to see how liturgical practices cantranslate themselves into a wider critique of the ‘false salvation’ of the state(including many more alternative imaginations of time and space), without insome way compromising its symbols with the language of ‘social ethics’ and thepolitics of ‘civil society’ which it so roundly condemns. Though it is certainly notCavanaugh’s intention, the book runs the risk of finding an easy shelter from thedilemmas of public engagement through a practice so radical and uncompromisingthat to those outside of its sphere of influence it might seem like a Sunday morningdistraction from, rather than a reshaping of, political life.Nevertheless, my concluding comment must be that the book brings new insight to

the concept of ‘practising theology’ as well as a critique of late capitalism itself, andwill therefore be a welcome resource to many people. It serves as a reminder to thoseattempting to ‘be public’ and ‘be political’ theologically that they need not seethemselves as merely bolstering the message of political resistance with Christianreflection. The particularity of the alternative message and alternative practiceswithin their own faith traditions make an important addition to a growing counter-culture of imagining the world anew.

STEFAN SKRIMSHIRE

POLITICAL WORSHIP: ETHICS FOR CHRISTIAN CITIZENS byBernd Wannenwetsch,Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, Pp. 416, £75 hbk.

Wannenwetsch’s concern is for a recontextualisation of Christian ethics: ‘Do we nothave to see the Church . . . as the matrix out of which Christian ethics is born?’(p. 2). In thus locating the aetiology of Christian ethics, he engages both with thenature of the Church, which he sees as ‘political’, and with the nature of Christianethics, which he sees as springing from worship. However, the title of this denselyargued book is misleading, since it is not itself an ‘ethics’, nor is it about ‘politics’ or‘Christian citizens’ as the terms are ordinarily used. It might more accurately beentitled ‘Political worship: the source of ethics for citizens of the City of God’, oreven ‘A Christian metaphysics of morals’.Wannenwetsch engages first with ‘Worship as the Beginning of Christian Ethics’,

moving towards the integration of ‘lex orandi – lex credendi – lex bene operandi’. He

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argues that ‘‘‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’’ (Rom 8:2) is what constitutesthe church as a political community, as distinct from an amorphous socialprocess . . . As the Greeks knew – for a community to be free to act, it must have alaw; and that is how it becomes a political community’ (p. 26). So far as I can tell, hisfundamental point about ‘political worship’ is that it is worship which is truly Spirit-governed, so that the action which springs from that worship can be expected also tobe Spirit-governed. The Church as a spiritual polity (a term he does not use) thusgenerates through its worship norms for ethical action. One fundamental problem inthis section is that Wannenwetsch never explores precisely what he means by‘worship’. Though he makes extensive use of Wainwright and later Dix, there is, forexample, no study of the eucharist and ethics to focus his argument in liturgical praxis.A second problem is that nowhere does he discuss issues of church governance ormagisterium, which must inevitably arise if the Church is to be articulated in the wayhe commends. Another problem is that there are some extraordinary judgments – forexample: ‘Children express their thanks spontaneously. Gratitude, on the other hand,betrays a slave-like turn of mind ’ (p. 49, my emphasis).In a longer central section, Wannenwetsch considers ‘worship as the critical

power of Christian ethics: Christian citizens in a torn and divided world’. This isnot so much a discussion of what Christian citizens ought to do in a torn anddivided world, but of what it means to be a Christian citizen (i.e. a citizen of theCity of God) in a world of contested loyalties, and the way in which worshiptests and renews Christian identity for members of the Church. Key interlocutorshere are William Temple, Hannah Arendt and John Milbank. Amongst thecurious judgments in this section is the exclusion of Charles Gore from theAnglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England and his supposed failure – bycontrast with Eric Mascall – to recognise the central significance for ‘politicalethics’ of the Church as a social and political entity in its own right (p. 101).Another is that, ‘It would be difficult to ignore the political character of theChurch to the degree to which [Wayne] Meeks does’ (p. 134), a judgment whichappears to be based solely on The First Urban Christians (1983) and entirely toignore Meeks’s later work on early Christian ethics.In his final section on ‘Worship as formative power for Christian ethics’,

Wannenwetsch has a series of short essays on ‘unlearning the hermeneuticsof suspicion’; on consensus (without discussion of conciliarity or synodality);on homiletics, ‘life out of abundance’, and sabbath. This section, which Ifound the best in the book, is, however, relatively underdeveloped, and, givenits title, it is surprising to find that it makes no mention whatsoever of theeucharist.The blurb on the back cover speaks of this book ‘bringing into conversation a

variety of traditions (including Lutheran, Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox)’.This disguises the extent to which Wannenwetsch, who originally wrote the bookin German, works out of Lutheranism and the tradition of German, and to someextent American, evangelical theology. It is striking that a study that repeatedlyemphasises the centrality of worship for the formation of Christian living makesso little reference to Orthodox sources. The value of this book lies in its clearpresentation of a contemporary, German Protestant (but not Reformed) perspec-tive – but this is a perspective which here looks distinctly ethnocentric. I thoughtI was being offered a theological study of worship and the ethics of transforma-tive participation in the secular, plural polis. Unfortunately, Wannenwetsch’sbook throws virtually no light on any of the issues that trouble the ‘Christiancitizens’ I encounter in a ministry at Westminster Abbey.

NICHOLAS SAGOVSKY

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WORK AND HUMAN FULFILMENT edited by Edmund Malinvaud andMargaret S.Archer, Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Sapientia Pressof Ave Maria College, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 2003, Pp. 336, £47.95 pbk.

The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences was founded on the 1st January by PopeJohn Paul II. The Pope had announced to the Cardinals and other officials in theCuria on the 23rd of December 1993 his intention to continue pursuing the Church’sreflections on the social scene as set out for example in Centesimus Annus. So heissued the Motu Proprio Socialium Scientiarum by which the new Academy wasestablished. In due course Statutes of the Academy were approved. Its purpose is ‘theaim of promoting the study and progress of the social sciences, primarily economics,sociology, law and political science. The Academy, through an appropriate dialogue,thus offers the Church the elements which she can use in the development of hersocial doctrine, and reflects on the application of that doctrine in contemporarysociety.’ The Academy, which is autonomous, maintains a close relationship with thePontifical Council for Justice and Peace.The Academy is in its tenth year of work. It has held ten plenary sessions, the last

being from the 29th April to 3rd of May 2004. During its meeting it met with the Popewho congratulated the new President, Mary Ann Glendon, and the members on theirwork. The proceedings of the Academy are published at intervals after the plenarysessions and workshops. This book however is chiefly a collection of more thanthirty essays or extracts from papers presented at three plenary sessions by morethan thirty members of the Academy. These papers are introduced by a thematicintroduction by Professor Margaret Archer and concluded by a personal synthesisby the then President of the Academy Professor Edmond Mallinvaud, writing as amember of the Academy.This is a very large book of over 300 pages in near-to-A4 format. It is the work of

over thirty very expert and dedicated authors. The essays are set out in six parts: I.Work across the World: the present situation and current trends; II. The GlobalizedEconomy; III. Contemporary Institutions and their responses to unemployment; IV.Capital and Labour; V. Analysis of policy options; VI. The Culture of Work.The essays are very densely composed and written, which is not surprising since

they are desumed from more substantial papers presented at meetings of theAcademy. They are presented in English although this is not the first language ofa number of contributors. Some of the papers are very focused upon some particularexperience or evidence arising from the specific competence of the individual author.Many attempt to be wide-ranging since this is appropriate for academicians who arein the service of the universal Church and will want to aid the supreme Pastor in hisrole, although there is no indication of any author writing ‘to order’. What is to benoted is that the contributors and the range of their studies are in my view exces-sively based in the continents of Europe and North America.Because of the nature of these rather short essays dealing with extremely complex

and extensive subjects it would be inappropriate to embark upon any detailed criti-cism or even comment upon the opinions or conclusions advanced. As a whole thebook illustrates the type of work done by the Pontifical Academy but does notprovide a sufficiently detailed presentation to allow comment on the validity of theopinions and arguments on offer. Because of this it is not possible to comment on thequality of service provided to the Holy See in the social sciences by the Academy justfrom this publication. What is clear and positive is that many issues that bear relationto the social teaching of the Church are under review by a body of very dedicated,expert and learned people. No doubt the more developed and detailed papers pre-pared by the Academy are of considerable help to the Pope as he pursues his vocationto announce the Good News as it applies to human society to the Nations.

BISHOP JOHN JUKES OFM CONV.

462 Book Reviews

# The Dominican Council 2005